It seems fitting that Quentin Tarantino, a renowned film buff who rose from video-rental-store ranks, paid careful homage to specific westerns while making his own, The Hateful Eight. Explains the movie’s costume designer, former indie wardrobe queenCourtney Hoffman, “What was really unique about The Hateful Eight was that each of the characters comes from a different western almost. We referenced everything from spaghetti westerns to American westerns—Sam Jackson’s costume feels like a spaghetti western, for example. Then you get to the end of the movie, where everything is gritty and real, with the aging and blood and gore and darkness and sweat, you feel like you are in a Sam Peckinpah film like The Wild Bunch.”

Exacting in each element of his films, Tarantino made wardrobe notes in his script that, while mostly helpful, sometimes made realizing that early description difficult. “It took us a long time to find Major Warren, Sam Jackson’s character,” Hoffman explains, as way of example. “In the script, it’s referenced that he has facial hair and a hat like [late western actor] Lee Van Cleef and wears a navy cavalry coat from the Union army.”

While other filmmakers might yield creative direction to department heads, Tarantino pushes his precision through all phases of production. “With Quentin, it’s so imperative that you not only know the script well, you have it memorized,” Hoffman says. “He really treats the script like a bible. He’ll say, ‘This is my bible and you better know your verses.’”

Hoffman created Jackson’s navy cavalry coat, referencing designs from the Civil War, with her own slight palette flourish: a brilliant marigold lining. “Historically, some of the coats did have that that yellow lining. And if you think back to Quentin’s other films—like Uma Thurman’s character in Kill Bill—he is known for his yellow. So it’s kind of that Tarantino yellow.” One of the movie’s standout visuals arrives when Jackson’s character lifts his arms, revealing the pristine lining in his coat—a flash of color that Tarantino had visualized in the script, and had to explain to Hoffman.

“One of the things that was interesting about that coat was that I thought that it should be aged,” Hoffman tells us. “[Sam’s character] had fought in the Civil War, he had tracked a bunch of bounties throughout the snow. It would have made sense for him to have that history on his clothes. But Quentin said, ‘Don’t age my lining. I want it to be pristine.’ And one of the cool things about spaghetti westerns is that their costumes look like they were just bought at the store. It was fun to mix around those pieces with, say, Sam’s aged gloves, which tell the story of where he’s been. That was a really cool Quentin Tarantino-ism that we brought to the aesthetic.”

Even though Tarantino had a painstakingly exact vision for how his characters dressed, there were a few spur-of-the-moment surprises that could have proved disastrous for the costume department given how remote their set was, deep in the snow-covered mountains of Colorado.

One day, for example, after traveling in a van, snowmobile, and by foot to get to a set on top of a mountain—hauling her heavy animal-hide costumes, no less—Hoffman was thrown a costume curve ball by Quentin.

“We’re doing this scene where the son of Bruce Dern’s character Smithers is naked,” Hoffman explains. “Quentin turns to me and he goes, ‘You know what? I want to shoot him before he’s taking his clothes off. Can you dress him?’” Unable to return to base camp in time to dress the character without disrupting the day’s 10-hour shooting schedule, Hoffman sorted through the extra clothes she brought—finding a hat, jacket, and stealing suspenders from another actor—and “created a costume that I could be proud enough of to be on camera in a Quentin Tarantino movie literally within under a half hour on a snowy mountain side.”

Because the film involves only 16 characters, Hoffman and her team were able to focus entirely on getting those costumes “perfect.” “If you look at Bob’s (Demian Bichir) coat, it’s a faux-fur coat that we actually patched with 11 different types of fur. Then you had to do that eight or more times to have enough coats for filming” that were all aged exactly the same. (All in, the production ended up with 140 multiples of the coats.)

Although she did use faux fur for Bob’s costume, Hoffman used the real stuff for most of her other designs. “The truth of the matter is with the 70-millimeter format and with it being shot on 65, every texture was important,” Hoffman says. “And just from a totally practical standpoint, it kept them warm. That’s what those bounty hunters did.”

Hoffman modeled the buffalo-hide coat worn by Kurt Russell’s character off of an authentic jacket from the 1800s at the Autry museum. The coat, nicknamed “Big Boy,” weighed about 10 pounds: “Kurt would complain that after a really long day it actually hurt his back, it’s so heavy.” Hoffman integrated different seasonal hides to make the coat—“the hides from the sleeves are winter hide; the hides on the body are more of a fall/spring hide”—using everything from hair dye to shoe polish to match the colors before Hoffman hand-barbered the coat herself.

Russell accessorized his look with a badger hat from Canada, that happened to be parted in the middle just like the actor’s mustache. Russell’s look was decidedly more aged than Jackson’s—“He doesn’t look as debonair as Sam because we wanted it to look like he’s been working his ass off. Whereas Sam just shoots the guys, drags them to a sled, and calls it a day, Kurt’s been hand dragging this feisty woman [Jennifer Jason Leigh] all over the country.

Leigh’s character, Daisy, was caught by Russell’s bounty hunter just as she was boarding a boat to Italy—a detail that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film. So Hoffman designed a beautiful dress—the best that the character owned—for her undergarment: a wool gabardine dress with a feminine print and hand-pleated bodice to accentuate the actress’s tiny waist. Over it, Hoffman designed a men’s leather jacket with bear-skin collar, and a fox hat. “We really wanted Jennifer and Kurt to feel like a Jack and Jill pairing,” Hoffman explains of the duo. “We wanted them to look like they were paper dolls that went together.”

With such a male-heavy cast, Hoffman relished her time outfitting female characters like Zoë Bell’s Six-Horse Judy, who wore a three-tiered buckskin, based on a piece in the Autry, that was inspired by Calamity Jane; and Gemma (Belinda Owino), whose femininity was accentuated with frills and a “jelly bean” aesthetic. But for Tarantino, the entire costume-design process is always especially integral, for each and every character, because it marks the moment that those badass personas he dreamed finally come to life.

“He’s in every fitting,” Hoffman says of the filmmaker. “Literally, if you take Walton Goggins for instance, we would dress him and he would go into the room that Quentin was in as his character and say his lines for Quentin. If it wasn’t the right costume, he’d send him back in and we’d do it all over again. That’s a really unique thing as a designer to have.”

“I think Robert De Niro once told Quentin that he does not become his character until he actually puts the character’s shoes on. Quentin was like, ‘Wait a second. Why wouldn’t I be there for that?’”

From Sketch to Still: The Spaghetti-Western Wit of Sharen Davis’s Django Unchained Costumes

Django Unchained costume designer Sharen Davis says Jamie Foxx loved wearing this outlandish, Little Lord Fauntleroy look. “It seemed as though it would be the most challenging costume to design, but it ended up being the easiest,” she says.

Photo: Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

The description of the costume in the script prompted Davis to think of Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 oil painting, Blue Boy. She included the image in a book of research she prepared for director Quentin Tarantino, and it inspired the final design.

Photo: From Wikipedia.

For action sequences, Davis adjusted the waist and rise of Django’s tailored suit. In the script, the suit is described as powder blue, but the designer opted for a deeper shade in a rich fabric. “I didn’t want the fabric to bounce. I didn’t want light to shine off it,” says Davis, “What I didn’t realize is how much it would absorb the light. The [directory of photography] said, ‘It looks great.’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh. It’s going to be really bright.’”

Photo: Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Although they looked great on paper, the heat sometimes presented a challenge for the real costumes. “We were filming in the heat of New Orleans. One day, Quentin looked at me and said, ‘Is the green coat melting?’ It would start getting saggy. I had to get a whole bunch of coats made to keep them perky.”

Photo: Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

“[Schultz’s] hat was designed as a combination of a high hat and a bowler. I took two hats to the hat-maker and said, ‘I want a marriage of these two.’ [Christoph Waltz] is very slight, so I knew if I was going to give him a big coat, I was going to need a hat to balance it out,” says Davis. Weirdly, a coat once worn by Telly Savalas (a.k.a. Kojak) inspired Schultz’s other coat, a faux chinchilla fur.

Photo: Left, Courtesy of The Weinstein Company; right, from NBC/Photofest.

For the slapstick sequence in which Big Daddy leads a surprise attack on Django, Davis says, “We had to make 300 hoods. The fabric is gauze. Gauze has changed my life on set! It hangs correctly and the actor can see through it. You can’t see them, but they can see what they’re doing.”

Photo: Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Django Unchained costume designer Sharen Davis says Jamie Foxx loved wearing this outlandish, Little Lord Fauntleroy look. “It seemed as though it would be the most challenging costume to design, but it ended up being the easiest,” she says.

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

The description of the costume in the script prompted Davis to think of Thomas Gainsborough’s 1770 oil painting, Blue Boy. She included the image in a book of research she prepared for director Quentin Tarantino, and it inspired the final design.

From Wikipedia.

For action sequences, Davis adjusted the waist and rise of Django’s tailored suit. In the script, the suit is described as powder blue, but the designer opted for a deeper shade in a rich fabric. “I didn’t want the fabric to bounce. I didn’t want light to shine off it,” says Davis, “What I didn’t realize is how much it would absorb the light. The [directory of photography] said, ‘It looks great.’ And I thought, ‘Uh-oh. It’s going to be really bright.’”

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Although they looked great on paper, the heat sometimes presented a challenge for the real costumes. “We were filming in the heat of New Orleans. One day, Quentin looked at me and said, ‘Is the green coat melting?’ It would start getting saggy. I had to get a whole bunch of coats made to keep them perky.”

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Director Quentin Tarantino watched Bonanza with the costume designer and referred to it frequently. Davis also reviewed many of the Westerns she’d seen with her father, a fan of the genre.

Davis used Charles Bronson’s The White Buffalo (1977) as a reference for Django’s sunglasses. “Jamie has a wide face, so it’s hard to find glasses for him,” Davis says. “I never told [Quentin Tarantino] where I got them.”

Davis created Broomhilda’s strong, final look to indicate the character’s new independence. The designer admits there’s a logic gap in this wardrobe choice, however. “Where she finds these clothes, we don’t know. You see her in a bed, and then you see her on the horse.”

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

“You too could buy this belt!” says Davis. “Sometimes I think the costume gods are shining over me. I thought, ‘Where am I going to get a belt for her 22-inch waist? I found it at the Peruvian Connection. ”

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Spaghetti Westerns often employed super-saturated colors. Davis nodded to the tradition with Broomhilda’s yellow, blue, and purple dresses. The silhouette seen here in Blood for a Silver Dollar(1965) is similar to that worn by Washington in the final scene.

From Everett Collection.

For the majority of the film, Davis says, Broomhilda (Kerry Washington) is dressed by others. Here, as a slave, she wears a simple purple dress. Later, at the Candie plantation, Davis imagined she might be dressed like a doll. By all accounts, Washington had the most trying role in the film.

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Broomhilda begins the film wearing dark purple and ends it in a lighter shade. Davis illustrated Broomhilda’s costume arc from the outset.

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

Many of Davis’s creations never made it to the screen. For instance, Davis intended for Broomhilda to wear these dresses during Django’s visions. The garments were made, but the scenes were not filmed.

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company (2).

Whereas Foxx is a stickler for fit, Davis reports that Leonardo DiCaprio took a low-key approach. “Leonardo was easygoing. I illustrated everything; so as long as it looked like the illustration, no one was surprised,” says Davis.
Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

I saw Calvin as a gambler, and a little bit like Rhett Butler. I combined those two ideas,” says Davis.

(Spoiler alert!) Calvin Candie’s supper suit hinted at his eventual demise. “I ordered real carnations and I ordered fake carnations. We ended up using a fake carnation, which was smart. You want to make sure the carnation is the same each time. Special effects rigged it to pump blood,” says Davis.

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

“That three-tier coat was so heavy! I made it out of some vintage cotton that we found, because I knew we’d be shooting in New Orleans. I think I broke his back, that coat weighed so much,” Davis says of Dr. King Schultz’s signature garment. “You could put anything on [Christoph Waltz] and he’d make it work. That guy can pull off a costume.”

Courtesy of The Weinstein Company.

“[Schultz’s] hat was designed as a combination of a high hat and a bowler. I took two hats to the hat-maker and said, ‘I want a marriage of these two.’ [Christoph Waltz] is very slight, so I knew if I was going to give him a big coat, I was going to need a hat to balance it out,” says Davis. Weirdly, a coat once worn by Telly Savalas (a.k.a. Kojak) inspired Schultz’s other coat, a faux chinchilla fur.

For the slapstick sequence in which Big Daddy leads a surprise attack on Django, Davis says, “We had to make 300 hoods. The fabric is gauze. Gauze has changed my life on set! It hangs correctly and the actor can see through it. You can’t see them, but they can see what they’re doing.”